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American Sovereignty Eroded through WTO Membership

February 22, 2014Benjamin Clement

Prior to the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), domestic policies were aimed at fostering growth and protecting our core industries. Tariffs and restrictions prevented foreign subsidized companies and governments from disarming our industries through predatory pricing, dumping and buyouts. The rest of the world marveled at the assets we had collected through our policies. They sought to establish “free trade” that would allow them to access our markets and allow access to the wealth we had achieved.

Following WWII, our domestic industries had little competition from abroad because of the destruction that had taken place in Europe and Asia. “Free trade” policies would have had little impact. Today, our foreign competitors are fully capable of fending for themselves and we have little practical reason for maintaining “free trade” practices except to maintain U.S. consumption at great expense to our long-term ability to compete. Freedom and “free trade” inevitably come at a price.

Today our involvement with the World Trade Organization (WTO) limits what Congress can legally legislate in terms of our trade policies, and by extension our industrial policies. The WTO is a restriction on our sovereignty, and for what? Other countries have discovered ways to circumvent the WTO rulings in their favor.

Agreements like NAFTA, which are overseen and regulated by the WTO, provide unprecedented access for foreign companies to access U.S markets. They need only export their raw goods to Mexico, assemble them there, and then drive them across the border to the U.S. duty-free. NAFTA and the WTO are unmitigated disasters. We are allowing other competing countries to export to America without restriction.

We MUST get out of the WTO and reverse ALL “free trade” agreements – replacing them with fair trade agreements. This is the ONLY way we will ever grow our economy again.